Dancing at Dusk: A Review

For twenty years Dusk Dances Inc. has made efforts to “lower theater walls” and make art accessible to urban communities, by bringing traditional and contemporary dance into public parks.

This August long weekend, Hamilton hosted its first ever Dusk Dances. While gulls flew overhead, and the sun bid a hazy farewell for the day, I and hundreds of other festival attendees wandered the grassy slopes of Bayfront Park, to watch a diverse collection of ten minute dance performances. Dogs, lawn chairs, and strollers came too.

Things got off to a peppy, retro start with an act called 1981 FM. The piece featured three energetic dancers who climbed, twirled, and leaped around (and on) a green Chevrolet Chevette– slamming its doors, slipping through its open windows, hopping sideways on (and off) its roof in seconds. As Michael Jackson and Queen broke through static of the car’s cranked radio, it really did feel like the audience had returned to an era of mullets, high waisted jeans and snug baseball shirts. Frankly, I wouldn’t have minded staying a bit longer.

Audience members were equally transfixed by the next act, Cercania. This may have been the first Flamenco performance I’ve ever seen, and I came away with a new respect for the art form. Emerging from behind a small hill, dancer Myriam Allard looked at first to be rising out of the water, which served as an ideal backdrop for the intense interplay of dance, percussion and singing that followed. Most mesmerizing to me were the heels of Allard’s feet, which pounded the stage’s flat surface with astounding speed and rhythmic grace. From start to finish, the act was a microcosm of stark beauty, strength and simplicity.

(Confession: I wasn’t able to see the third dance act, Julia Garlisi’s Weeping Meadow and Dust of Time, but I hear that it was a graceful and emotionally gripping piece. I’m sad to have missed it.)

For Denise Fujiwara’s Unquiet Winds, viewers migrated from water’s edge to a small cluster of trees, where white lanterns hung from green branches. A single bell tinkled and two ethereal figures dressed entirely in white, (Cheryl Lalonde’s costume design was both dreamy and whimsical) drew closer.

Sylvie Bouchard and Brendan Wyatt brought a feather light touch to every movement—tiptoeing round one another, tumbling backwards, and rising again like fickle currents of air. I later learned later that Unquiet Winds was inspired by medieval Japanese and European love poems, which might explain the coy, mysterious chemistry between the two characters.

What the evening’s last act lacked in poetic drama, it made up for in bright blue spandex. Synchronized swimmers. In petite pools. Need I say more? Mairéad Filgate and Brodie Stevenson were the stars of Inner City Sirens, Part II, and gave us all a soaking wet dose of cartoony fun; leaping, flailing, and flexing their arm muscles inside inflatable pools. They were almost as good as the musicians who took their place. I’d expand on that, but I think you really had to be there to understand.

For me, Dusk Dances was an unpretentious and engaging way to bring art to the masses. The park was a wonderful setting for choreographers to share their work. Might this be the start of a beautiful summer time tradition? I sure hope so.